How To Use Emoji Natively on Windows 10

Emoji is getting so popular that how Windows 10 can miss the ride. Believe it or not, according to Emojipedia’s changelog, it even supports middle finger Emoji at one point. Windows 8 was the first version of Windows that supports Emoji out of the box but only in black and white. And Windows 10 is the version that gets a lot of updates that caught up with the tide.

To use Emoji on Windows 10, you need to enable the touch keyboard first. Right-click the taskbar and choose Show touch keyboard button.

Once enabled, you will see a keyboard icon shown up in the system tray next to the clock. Click on it to bring up the Touch Keyboard, like below:

Then click on that smiley face icon to enable the Emoji icons.

You can use the left or right arrows on the left to navigate through the emoji icons or go through different categories for more types of icons to use. There are quite a lot to choose from.

But as you can see here, the Touch Keyboard is made for the computers with the touch screen. What about those that don’t? Bringing it up manually and pick one from the keyboard using a mouse may be too tedious.

The good news is, the build 16215 released to Windows Insider introduced a new way to insert emoji into any programs you are using. And it’s so easy. Simply press Win + . (dot or period) or Win + ; (semicolon), this emoji panel pops up right at where your cursor is.

You can quickly scroll through and pick the emoji you want. Even more, in “People” emoji category, you can change the skin tone of the emoji by clicking the button on the top-right:

You can also navigate through the panel by using the following keyboard shortcuts:

Arrow keys – Navigate among emoji

Tab / Shift + Tab – Switch emoji category

Enter – Select an emoji

Esc – Close the panel

Currently, this new emoji experience on Windows is only available in the English language. Hopefully, it will be available later in more languages.